Bush and the NAACP: a fundamental disconnect

President Bush addressed the NAACP yesterday for the first time since winning the White House, which means that he and the civil rights organization have finally reached a détente of sorts after six years of sporadic mutual distrust. I suppose I could just kiss off this event by noting that Bush’s bid to gin up black support for the GOP is probably futile, given the fact that, according to the polls, he currently enjoys the support of roughly nine percent of all African-Americans -- down from 18 percent in December ’04.

And it’s hard to imagine that Bush made many converts when he said that blacks should join him in his quest to eliminate the federal estate tax -- a pet GOP issue of greatest interest to rich white people who want to pass on their inheritances, and thus an issue that touches the lives of a minute fraction of black people. Indeed, there was predictably not a line in his speech about poverty, or, more specifically, about the latest Census Bureau figures which show that, during the first four years of his presidency, the percentage of blacks living below the poverty line jumped from 22.7 to 24.7, an increase of nine million.

There’s a lot more that can be said about what he didn’t say -- such as the fact that he opposes an increase in the minimum wage, and that he opposes expansion of the earned-income tax credit, a longstanding program that supplements low-wage incomes -- but I was most interested in something that he did say. One quick line, during the first 60 seconds:

“I come from a family committed to civil rights.”

That, really, is the crux of the matter. Yesterday’s address wasn’t just about trying to woo some black voters away from the Democrats party in the runup to the ’06 elections. It was, more importantly, the latest attempt (among countless attempts going back several generations) by a Bush family member to win over the black community simply by insisting that he is personally pure of heart. The Bushes have long sought to trumpet their good intentions, in the hopes that this would translate into mass black political support. The effort has never worked, but they keep trying anyway.

The president’s grandfather, Prescott, was a Connecticut senator during the ‘50s; he sponsored school desegregation bills. The president’s father, George H.W., was a young oil wildcatter in west Texas when he invited a local NAACP official to dinner at his house -- a shocking event in 1948. Some years later, when he chaired a county GOP committee, he put party funds in a black-owned bank, and in 1968, when he was serving in Congress, he supported fair housing legislation. The president’s brother, Jeb, has tried reaching out to blacks as Florida governor, and declaring how “it was wrong” when he ignored black voters during his first try for the big chair.

The problem, however, is that most black voters continue to judge politicians not on their good intentions, or whether their family has long been “committed to civil rights,” but on how they actually perform. President Bush may have admitted yesterday that he considered it “a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African American community,” but the fact is that the modern GOP over the past three decades has successfully wooed white voters with race-coded messages about crime, welfare, and job competition.

Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” was specifically designed to woo whites who couldn’t abide the northern Democratic-led crusades for desegregation and voting rights. The plan worked, and the GOP's dominance below the Mason-Dixon line is the result. Variations on the plan have worked ever since. The current president’s father won his 1988 race in part by sowing fear, in his TV ads, that his Democratic opponent would be soft on black criminals.

There is no sign thus far that George W. Bush will trigger a black stampede to the GOP simply because he is sincere about his intentions. It one thing for him to testify to his good heart, and to point out, as he did yesterday, that he applauds the GOP Congress’ renewal of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. But the reality is that the Bush administration’s Justice Department -- which is supposed to investigate such allegations as minority disenfranchisement at the ballot box – has not exactly followed the precepts of Martin Luther King.

The department's Civil Rights Division lawyers have twice signed off on Republican voting plans, in Georgia and Texas, that were later slapped down by the courts because they discriminated against minority voters. Not so coincidentally, the Division has been suffering a brain drain, with career civil rights lawyers quitting and young conservative idealogues taking their jobs. Reportedly, two-thirds of the lawyers in the Divison’s voting rights office have turned over during the past few years.

All told, it’s a cinch bet that Bush’s NAACP listeners care more about policy and performance than testaments to a family’s personal decency. As black politics expert David Bositis, an occasional GOP adviser on minority issues, told me right after the Katrina debacle, “Republicans always think that if they make some small (outreach) gestures, that African Americans will applaud their good intentions. They still don’t understand that African Americans would look at (the record) and conclude, ‘Those people really don’t like us.’”

Joe, Gil, Ralph, John, and The Massager

Let's do some quick hits:

When I heard the other day that a Washington-based Democratic strategist named Tom Lindenfeld was heading up to Connecticut to work for Senator Joe Lieberman's primary campaign, I knew it meant that Joe was in big trouble. And that Joe knows it as well.

Theoretically, an incumbent Democratic senator should have no need to hire a grassroots turnout specialist at the eleventh hour; theoretically, a senior figure like Lieberman should be no more concerned about his primary challenger than a picnicker is concerned about the fly who's buzzing his hamburger. Clearly, however, Lieberman's internal polling indicates that the average grassroots Connecticut Democrat is actually poised to strip away his party designation on Aug. 8, and award the '06 Senate nomination to his antiwar challenger, Ned Lamont. Hence the apparent need to rush Lindenfeld into the breach, in the hope that he can gin up a ground game in a mere 19 days.

And now we have outside confirmation of Lieberman's mounting woes. The latest Quinnipiac University poll now reports that the heretofore little-known Lamont, who trailed Lieberman by 15 points in June, today leads Lieberman by four points. That's a stunning finding. It's also further evidence that your average Connecticut Democrat increasingly views Lieberman as fatally compromised by his longstanding national-security alliance with President Bush; by his refusal to hold Bush accountable for the well-documented string of administration failures in Iraq; and by his insistence that Democratic dissent is not appropriate.

As a barometer of mainstream Democratic opinion, I offer Richard Schneller, age 84, a retired Connecticut legislator who led the state Senate Democrats back in the early '80s, when I was covering politics in that state. He emailed me the other day: "I just think that Joe is way off base in his support of the war in Iraq, and his support of Bush. I don't consider myself a liberal Democrat, whatever that is, but I'm voting for Ned Lamont because I want to send a message to Joe Lieberman that the war in Iraq, and many things that the Bush administration is doing as a result of invading Iraq, are very detrimental to the future health and well being of the United States."

It's not the liberal bloggers who Lieberman should be worried about on Aug. 8. It's folks like Dick Schneller.

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Speaking of Iraq, here's another defeatist, hate-America, cut-and-run complaint about the current conditions on the ground in Baghdad:

"The condition there is worse than I expected....I have to be perfectly candid: Baghdad is a serious problem.....It’s not safe to go anywhere outside of the Green Zone any part of the day....All of the information we receive sometimes from the Pentagon and the State Department isn’t always true....I don’t want to predict what will happen if things don’t get better....What I think we need to do more is withdraw more Americans."

Must be Michael Moore taking a quick tour, right? Or maybe a "liberal" journalist who is too chicken to leave the hotel room? Or maybe a weak-kneed Democratic senator who has succumbed to anti-Bush hysteria?

No, those remarks (here and here) were uttered this week by Republican congressman Gil Gutknecht of Minnesota. A member of the Newt Gingrich class of 1994. His 2004 rating from the American Conservative Union is 94 percent, his ACLU rating is zero percent, and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action rate him at five percent. And he's far from alone these days on the Republican side.

What does it say about Joe Lieberman when even a conservative back-bencher like Gil Gutknecht seems more willing than he is to question the Bush administration on Iraq?

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This is my last word on Ralph Reed, unless or until he resurrects his dashed political dreams. I only note today that, according to conservative journalist Rich Lowry, the ex-religious right leader and aspiring president has decided to blame his disastrous loss in Georgia not on his own shortcomings (well-documented corruption) but on those who exposed and reported on his corruption.

From Lowry today: "Reed's connection to the (Jack) Abramoff stuff had broken back in the summer of 2004, so it couldn't have been predicted that it would be such a huge deal even now. But it was. The Reed camp blames John McCain for playing payback for his 2000 primary defeat with a campaign of leaks, and the press, of course, was happy to pile on."

Blaming the press is the usual yawn. That aside, it's noteworthy that he blames McCain. It was McCain's panel, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which exposed Reed's unsavory relations with now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff, most recently in a report released in June. It so happens that McCain had the facts on his side, but let's just say that McCain is surely shedding no tears today, knowing that his panel's report helped fuel Reed's defeat in the lieutenant governor's race.

McCain's 2000 presidential fortunes crashed in the 2000 South Carolina primary, after conservative voters got wind of artfully circulated "rumors" that McCain was nuts due to his years as a POW; that he was the favored candidate of gay activists; and that he had fathered an illegitimate child (actually, he and his wife had adopted a Bangladeshi girl). McCain has long blamed Reed for those rumors -- Reed was one of Bush's top southern honchos at the time -- so perhaps there is an element of "payback" in what happened in Georgia Tuesday night. But the bottom line is, Reed provided McCain with the factual ammo to blast him asunder.

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I don't want to make a big deal out of this, but I'm just asking:

Was there something wierdly inappropriate about The Decider unilaterally deciding this week to become The Massager?

It's captured on video: With war raging in the Middle East, with North Korea testing missiles, and with America's image in the world at low ebb, President Bush walks into a G-8 summit meeting, and decides to lay hands upon the only female world leader at the table. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel confers with a colleague on her right, Bush summarily administers a drive-by shoulder massage. Whereupon the surprised Merkel jerks her arms upward, in the kind of reflexive response last seen when a crazed tennis fan snuck up behind Monica Seles and stuck a blade in her back.

Some Bush defenders insist, naturally, that what he did with this woman isn't as bad as what Bill Clinton used to do with his women. (See first posted comment here). Granted, Clinton's myriad backstage peccadillos are well-established as factual reality. But, again, I'm just asking: Did Bill Clinton ever find it appropriate to exercise a right to preemptively grope a female head of state in a world summit meeting? And, if he had, can you imagine how his critics would have reacted? For those of you who do think that the Merkel massage was a tad cringe-worthy, you might enjoy this expression of disdain.

"OK, disease sufferers, you won't get advanced medical research, but at least we disagreed on whether to disappoint you!"

As I watched President Bush explain today why he vetoed the popular bill that would have expanded embryonic stem-cell research ("I'm not going to allow it!"), I realized that this episode does have a potential political upside for the GOP (notwithstanding everything I wrote yesterday). That scenario goes something like this:

The Democrats, with an eye on the '06 elections, are constantly inveighing against what they call "the rubber stamp Republicans," suggesting that the GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill basically march in step with The Decider -- and therefore deserve to be defeated in November. But the stem-cell episode undercuts that argument. In May 2005, when the House decisively passed the stem-cell bill, 50 of 230 Republicans voted Yes for passage. And yesterday, when the Senate decisively followed suit, 19 of 54 Republicans voted Yes for passage. The 19 defectors included anti-abortion stalwarts Bill Frist, Trent Lott, Orrin Hatch, and John Warner, all of whom saw expanded embryonic stem-cell research as a "pro-life" initiative.

Today, we also saw some anti-lockstep behavior in the Republican House. Witness Curt Weldon, the longtime Republican congressman who represents a suburban Philadelphia district that has been slowly trending Democratic. Weldon is in a tougher than expected re-election race. Last year, he voted NO on the expansion of stem-cell research. But today, he said he intended to vote YES, in favor of overriding Bush's veto. Clearly he thinks that fighting with with Bush on this issue could be a political boon back home; in defying Bush, he emailed this message today: "I find it difficult to look a mother or father in the eye who has a sick child and tell them I didn't do everything in my power to try to help them find a cure for their child."

Bush stood against all these dissenting Republicans today, but that's the point: By publicly disagreeing on such a high-stakes issue, they've all demonstrated (at least in this instance) that the GOP's game is not simply a matter of Follow the Leader. That might not be a comfort to families suffering from debilitating diseases and hoping that America might lead the world in medical advances, but a GOP "big tent" talking point might be enough to blunt the Democrats' "rubber stamp" line.

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By the way, I don't think it's worth spending a lot of time talking about how this is Bush's first veto, and about how historic that is because only Thomas Jefferson waited as long to nix a bill. The moment is overrated, because, lest we forget, Bush has become a master of the "signing statement." Instead of vetoing bills that he has disliked during the past five years, he has opted instead to sign them into law and append statements indicating that he reserved the right not to obey them. He has reportedly done this 750 times, a number that far exceeds the 575 signing statements issued by all his predecessors combined.

Ralph Reed and the politically fatal intersection of God and commerce

The best laid plans of Ralph Reed -- the onetime cherubic public face of the Christian Coalition and media-savvy front man for the religious right -- have been rudely derailed by Georgia voters, who apparently decided last night that this purported exemplar of moral virtue had become a poster boy for Washington sleaze.

It now does not appear that Reed, a high-rolling lobbyist in recent years, will be charting a presidential bid in 2016 or 2020 after all (that was indeed part of his master plan), because as he sought to climb the first rung on the electoral ladder, he was summarily yanked back to earth. So much for his former boast about leaving his opponents in “body bags.”

Step one of his ascent was to be the lieutenant governor job in Georgia. But he was thrashed in the Republican primary last night by a little-known conservative challenger, state senator Casey Cagle, who took 56 percent of the vote and dominated in the populous conservative-leaning suburbs around Atlanta. Thus, in defeat, Reed becomes the first electoral casualty of the Jack Abramoff scandal and, more broadly, of the Washington “culture of corruption,” where morals are traded in for big money.

Reed’s defeat is arguably a warning to other scandal-marred pols that the ‘06 elections won’t necessarily be a cakewalk. This morning, public interest activist David Donnelly, the national campaigns director at the Public Campaign Action Fund, contended that the Reed debacle sends a message: “Politicians who side with donors and big-moneyed interests, and not with voters, can’t depend on their base” to stay faithful on election day. He cited five Capitol Hill incumbents (four Republicans, one Democrat) who are seeking re-election despite being enmeshed in money and lobbying scandals.

In the Georgia race, Cagle successfully persuaded conservative primary voters that Reed’s longstanding ties to convicted felon Abramoff had essentially dented his halo (Time magazine had once referred to Reed as the “right hand of God”). Cagle said of Reed, “his values are for sale,” and a U.S. Senate report backed him up. Reed, in 1999, had crusaded on moral grounds against southern gambling bills -- when, in reality, he was taking gambling money from a native-American tribe (the Mississippi Band of Choctaws) that already owned casinos and was mainly interested in ridding themselves of gambling competition.

As he took heat for this in Georgia, Reed insisted that he hadn’t known he was being paid with gambling money (the Choctaws were Abramoff clients, and the money had been routed through Abramoff). Reed’s standard stump line was, “Had I known then what I know now, I would not have taken the work.”

The problem with his denial, however, is that it rang false. The Senate report contains some juicy emails. One, from 1999, features Abramoff telling Reed to “get me invoices as soon as possible so I can get Choctaw to get us checks ASAP.” And in 2000, Abramoff tells Reed, “The firm has held back all payments, pending receipt of a check from Choctaw.” It was this kind of evidence that prompted former Reed loyalist and Georgia lobbyist Clint Austin to announce in a primary eve Internet posting that he would vote for Cagle, because “Reed’s words and actions do not match up.”

In political circles, Reed’s struggles have prompted little sympathy. Centrist Democratic think tank denizen Marshall Wittmann, who once worked for Reed as a Christian Coalition lobbyist, wrote the other day, “Insofar as the Lord seems to treat the self-righteous with special disdain, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ralph gets a busy signal if he calls for divine intervention on his behalf.”

But Democrats generally might be well advised not to view Reed’s demise as a victory for their side. After all, he was beaten in a Republican primary by another conservative; the voters were not being asked to choose between him and a Democrat. And if he had won last might, he may well have beaten his Democratic opponent in November -- a plausible outcome in GOP-trending Georgia. In other words, Democrats still don’t know whether Abramoff baggage is fatal in an interparty contest.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Ralph Reed can no longer lay claim to the loyalties of Christian conservatives, not after trading on their values for special-interest cash, and that in itself is a noteworthy development. Perhaps Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, best diagnosed Reed’s problem last April, when he told the press, in the wake of the Reed-Abramoff revelations, that “the Bible says you can’t serve God and Mammon.”

Will Ralph Reed win redemption?

Still wondering whether Republicans will be hurt at the polls this year by the Jack Abramoff scandal, and its various corruption subplots? There has been scant evidence thus far, but we will see a fresh test tonight, in Georgia, where one-time religious right golden boy Ralph Reed is trying to win the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor.

Reed, who once helmed the Christian Coalition and was lionized at an early age for his political savvy, left the organization late in 1998 for the financially lucrative world of political consulting. He quickly hooked up with super-lobbyist/networker Abramoff, his conservative friend and comrade from the early '80s (telling Abramoff in an email, "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!"), and made a pile of dough. The problem is, the recent past has intruded on his maiden foray into elective politics - an important foray, because everyone around Reed knows that he sees the lieutenant governorship as the first stepping stone to very high office.

It will be instructive to see whether he prevails tonight, in his GOP primary race against state senator Casey Cagle. Last year, he looked like a cinch winner. But then his fundraising fell off, and now the polls show Cagle slightly ahead. What happened? Well, a Senate report was released in June showing that Reed took $5 million from Abramoff to wage a grassroots moral crusade against legalized gambling in the South; in reality, the money was put up by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (Abramoff clients), who already had Gulf Coast casinos and wanted to thwart any competitors from butting in. Nothing illegal here, just a shrewd (or hypocritical) meshing of God and commerce. In any case, Reed says now that he had no idea where the money came from. Also, Reed and Abramoff (now a convicted felon) are being sued by another tribe, in Texas, on charges of "corruption and deceit."

Will Georgians derail Reed from his carefully-charted political fast track? Tune in tomorrow.

Most call it hope for millions, Bush calls it "murder"

The Republican-led Senate has spoken -- today, by a 63-37 vote, it passed a bill expanding federally-financed stem cell research --and now President Bush must decide whether he sides with the religious and social conservatives who oppose that research, or with the clear majority of his fellow citizens.

Actually, he has already made up his mind -- his heart is with his political base -- which means that, when he issues the first veto of his presidency, he will be defying the medical community, the scientific community, 41 Nobel laureates, hundreds of citizen health groups, Nancy Reagan, and the millions of Americans who see value in doing the advanced research that could pioneer new treatments for serious diseases.

The stem-cell issue, which has been debated for the past several days, is a textbook example of the fundamental divide within the Republican party. Potentially, as the '06 election draws near, this issue is political poison for the GOP, although that assumes the Democrats would know what to do with the gift that is about to be placed in their perpetually tremulous hands.

The issue itself -- spending taxpayers' money to conduct research on diseases by using stem cells taken from human embryos -- is broadly popular among moderate Republicans, centrist Republicans, and probably conservative Republicans whose loved ones suffer from serious illness. Two years ago, a University of Pennsylvania National Annenberg Election Survey reported that 53 percent of Republicans nationwide support stem-cell research. Last year, a CBS poll reported a GOP plurality in favor of such research, 46 percent to 42 percent. The overall national percentage of Americans favoring stem-cell work is as high as 70 percent.

Even Senate Republican leader and presidential hopeul Bill Frist (anxious to repair his medical bona fides after that episode when he offered his video diagnosis of Terri Schiavo) strongly pushed the bill to expand stem-cell research. But, within the GOP base, the religious and social conservatives say thumbs-down - and they still hold sway at the White House. Bush and his lieutenants remain dedicated to keeping them happy, especially during the runup to congressional elections that will require a strong base turnout.

So the White House position is that Bush will veto this measure -- already passed last year by the Republican House, normally a bastion of pro-Bush sentiment -- and thus sustain the tight restrictions that Bush himself imposed on federal stem-cell research back in August 2001.

It's hard to see how the GOP can emerge from this episode politically unscathed. In the wake of Bush's expected veto -- which would probably be upheld, since two-thirds of the lawmakers in each chamber would be needed to override him -- independent and moderate swing voters may well conclude that Bush considers his fealty to the religious right to be more important than the health of millions of Americans.

A Bush veto could also put the political squeeze on conservative senators such as Jim Talent, who voted today against the stem-cell research bill. His re-election in Missouri is being threatened this year because swing-voting Missourians appear to be siding with stem cells and science. It's noteworthy that last weekend the national Democrats chose Talent's opponent, Claire McCaskill, to deliver the party's Saturday radio address.

Another potentially vulnerable senator is Rick Santorum, who's already trailing Democratic challenger Bob Casey Jr. by double digits in the polls, and who also voted NO today on stem-cell research. To survive in November, he'll need at least minimally respectable support out of the populous suburbs -- but that's where stem-cell research is broadly popular, and where Bush-style social conservatism is not. As Kenneth Davis, a county GOP chairman in the Philadelphia suburbs, told me a couple years ago, stem-cell research "is something everyone can relate to, because everyone has a story about a loved-one's illness." (Casey also broadly opposes using federal money on expanded stem-cell research; on the other hand, his party is far more supportive of the idea than Bush's GOP.)

Bush has long viewed his willingness to defy majority sentiment as an asset; in the words of press secretary Tony Snow the other day, "People like leadership much better than a finger in the wind." But in this case, the leader has misrepresented some of the facts. Bush claimed, in a White House message the other day, that the stem-cell bill "would use Federal taxpayer dollars to support and encourage the destruction of human life for research.” In reality, the stem cells covered by the bill have been specifically created for in-vitro fertilization, are no longer needed and, if not used for research purposes, would be discarded anyway as medical waste. Frist also described the bill this way, in a Washington Post op-ed column this morning.

But the White House is not interested in such nuance; as Snow put it today, "the simple answer is, he thinks murder's wrong." (Snow has only been at the White House a few months, but he's already starting to talk like Bush.)

By all accounts, a Bush veto thus presents Democrats with an electoral opportunity. Many Republicans recognize this; a northeastern party official told CNN today that the stem-cell issue is a "stinker" for the GOP, because "when you're portrayed as arguing against treatment of disease, it's a tough place to be politically."

As political columnist Jules Witcover notes here, even Democratic leaders acknowledge that they have failed in recent connections to connect with the day-to-day concerns of average voters. Yet as the polls demonstrate, the stem-cell issue already clicks with the concerns of average voters. Cancer, MS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, among many other crippling diseases, attack Americans across the ideological divide.

Therefore, the question is whether the Democrats can manage to invoke the Bush veto and rhetorically contend that the president is "out of the mainstream," that he is "against" improving the health and reducing the suffering of his fellow citizens. Even Bill Frist referred to the stem-cell bill as "preserving life," so what does opposition to the bill imply?

The Democrats will undoubtedly some attack lines during the (probably futile) effort later this week to override the expected veto. Suffice it to say that Karl Rove, if working for the other team, could craft this one in his sleep.

The specter of vigorous oversight

Thank you, editors! Normally, I am not pleased when (on rare occasions) they cut stuff from my print columns without advance notice and I am left to discover the excisions when I pick up the paper. But yesterday, they probably did me a big favor when they trimmed a key paragraph in the interests of space.

In a column about the fitful efforts by the GOP Congress to conduct meaningful oversight of the Bush administration, I cited several examples of the Republicans seemingly rousing themselves from their five-year slumber. For instance, I wrote, "Last Thursday, after weeks of prodding by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, the White House agreed to comply, at least in part, with a 1978 law and thus submit its warrantless surveillance program for scrutiny by a secret intelligence court."

It turns out that the Specter sentence didn't make it into print. In retrospect, that's just as well -- because the more I look at Specter's deal with Bush, the less I am convinced that it qualifies as an example of meaningful oversight.

This was supposed to be Specter's finest moment, his triumph in holding President Bush accountable to the rule of law. Bush's domestic surveillance program, exposed last December, directly violated the 1978 Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which basically decreed that all proposed surveillance targets be reviewed in advance by a secret FISA court . The law expressly states that FISA shall be the "exclusive" overseer of such executive activity. Bush's program, however, was proceeding without any legislative or judicial oversight. Hence, Specter's avowed determination to get some compliance.

Well, I've now read all the fine print in the ballyhooed deal -- and it looks like yet another triumph for the imperial presidency. Or, as Yale constitutional law professor Jack Balkin calls it, "a virtual blank check to the Executive...a complete and total sham."

Basically, rather than holding Bush to the rule of law, Specter's deal alters the rules to help Bush. The compromise bill makes it clear that FISA and its panel of judges are no longer the "seclusive" overseer of electronic survillance; under Specter's deal -- which still has to be approved by Congress -- electronic survillance would now be authorized "under the constitutional authority of the executive, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978."

Under the constitutional authority of the executive...now there's a loophole that would swallow an SUV. That's boilerplate for the Bush legal team's argument that the president has inherent powers to do what he wants in wartime, under Article II of the Constitution. In fact, Specter's bill states this even more explicitly in Section 801: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers." For the legal eagles at the White House, that sentence is the gold standard.

So the political question is, what will the congressional Democrats do about this? Will they basically accept the Specter compromise as a prudent "middle ground," for fear that they will be labeled as "soft of terrorists" if they fight for tougher restrictions on Bush? Or, as some First Amendment experts are urging, will they have the guts to frame the issue to their own advantage?

First Amendment lawyer Glenn Greenwald offered this formula over the weekend: "This is not a debate about whether to eavesdrop on al Qaeda -- everyone is for that -- but is about whether George Bish should have the power to eavesdrop on Americans with no oversight, an awesome power which this country overwhelmingly decided (by enacting FISA) 30 years ago, in the wake of decades of abuses, that we do not trust the president -- any president -- to have."

But it's probably not a good bet to expect the Democrats to go to the mat on this...not when they couldn't even stand firm and defend their online political ad which showed a quick visual of flag-covered coffins in Iraq.

As I noted here Friday (see below), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (which is running the effort to take over the House) had posted a web ad which touched on the war in Iraq by showing some coffins of slain soldiers. The Republicans squawked that this was "despicable," that the ad should be removed, and two incumbent southern Democratic congressmen agreed. For a couple days late last week, the national Democrats staunchly defended the ad, and suggested that the GOP had some nerve, given the fact that they where the ones who had shown disrespect for the troops by sending them into battle with inadequate body armor and equipment.

But, sure enough, late last Friday (politicians always do their embarrassing stuff on Fridays, when they don't think the press will notice), the Democrats pulled the ad off their website. They replaced with a minimum wage ad.

Why did they go belly up?
DCCC spokesman Bill Burton replied: "We're moving to another major effort that we're highlighting on our Web site."

Well, that certainly clears it up. Here's a translation: "We prefer not to say why we validated the Republican charge by bowing to their demands."

"We're shocked, SHOCKED, that line-crossing is going on in here!"

It's always amusing to watch mud-slingers accuse each other of fighting dirty.

Exhibit A this week has been the orchestrated flap over a 60-second Democratic online video that includes a two-second clip of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. Seeking to advance its latest campaign message ("America Needs a New Direction"), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is helming the party's bid to take over the House in November, recently posted a web ad depicting all the bad things that Democrats are seeking to blame on President Bush and the GOP. One bad thing, the web ad alleges, is the war in Iraq. Hence, the quick shot of the coffins.

Hence, the Republicans have gone berserk. I just spent part of my workday reading and deleting the many expressions of their well-orchestrated outrage. It is "despicable," they say, that the Democrats should stoop so low as to show images of the fallen. Various Republican congressmen have come forth to say that the ad "turned my stomach," and that it is "tasteless", and that it "crossed the line."

Let us walk that "line" for a moment:

In the GOP's definition of ethical campaigning, it apparently "crosses the line" to show the coffins of dead U.S. soldiers (94.5 percent of whom have been killed subsequent to Bush's declaration that "major combat operations have ended") -- but it doesn't cross the line to put the face of a convicted black rapist on the TV screen (1988) and suggest that if the purported crime softy Michael Dukakis becomes president, your wives and daughters will be endangered. Under GOP rules, it crosses the line to show a quick visual depiction of America's overriding issue, but it doesn't cross the line to put Osama bin Laden's face on the TV screen (2002) and suggest that if Vietnam war hero Max Cleland is reelected to his Democratic Senate seat in Georgia, it would be good news for Osama bin Laden.

Some top conservative bloggers don't buy the GOP's argument. Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics writes, "The outrage seems misplaced, if not a bit phony and hypocritical...The war in Iraq is the defining issue of our time, and the Democratic party is vehemently opposed to it. Soldiers are, in fact, dying in Iraq on a daily basis. So why can't the Democrats show a split-second visual depiction of that reality? What are they supposed to do, show a graph of the U.S. casualty rate to depict the sacrifices we're making in Iraq? Not mention them at all?"

Another conservative blogger, at Captain's Quarters, writes that "we should be careful with our moral outrage. The Democrats have every right to campaign on a belief that the Iraq war has failed, all evidence to the contrary." And another, Ryan Sager, calls the Democratic imagery "a perfectly legitimate piece of political message-making," just as it was legitimate in 2004 when a Bush ad used a brief visual of a flag-draped coffin being carried from the rubble on 9/11.

And here's the capper. Mark McKinnon, President Bush's longtime ad man, says of the coffin visual, "This is one where I respectfully disagree with my colleagues: I think it is an appropriate image."

It's hard to imagine that rough and tumble Republican politicos are really and truly in a swivet over such a tactic. This is really just an exercise in hardball gamesmanship, a savvy attempt by the GOP to sow dissent within the Democratic ranks over what should be deemed the proper boundaries of political debate in 2006. After all, Democrats are known to be far less adept than their counterparts at maintaining unity and message discipline.

And here's a news flash: The GOP umbrage effort has already worked.

The Republicans sent word to their candidates in the field, asking that they put the squeeze on all Democratic opponents, demanding (in their framing of the issue) that the Democrats either side with the DCCC or with the brave American soldiers who are fighting and dying for freedom. Sure enough, three Democrats -- congressman John Spratt in South Carolina, congressman Chet Edwards in Texas, and candidate Bruce Braley in Iowa -- have broken ranks and asked the DCCC to pull the video.

There are no plans for a party mea culpa, and the GOP wouldn't expect that. This is merely about keeping the other team off balance, getting the opposition to perhaps pull its punches when the game is on the line later this year. Manufactured outrage can be a tool in making that happen.

As for conservative blogger Jim Geraghty at the National Review, he seems to feel that the GOP shouldn't waste its time taking umbrage at imagery, when in fact it has a stronger case on the merits: "I don't think it's inherently offensive to show images suggesting the fallen and contending, 'This is too high a price to pay.' Of course, the ad says jack squat about what Democratic legislators would do differently in Iraq, probably because they couldn't get a consensus in their caucus if their political lives depended on it."

No argument there.

Personally, I'd rather listen to Springsteen

I'm slated to be on the air at Philadelphia's NPR outlet, WHYY, 90.9 FM, from 10 to 11 a.m. on Friday morning. The topic will be Congress and the '06 elections; Susan Milligan, who covers Congress for the Boston Globe, is tapped to join me. Apparently you can also listen online at http://www.whyy.org/91FM/live.html. Feel free to call in, assuming you're not already in TGIF leisure mode. I should be sufficiently caffeinated at that hour.

A watchdog goes to obedience school

The Republican Congress has signaled lately that it might be wearying of its longstanding role as obedient doormat for the Bush administration. This week alone, three different committees are looking at Bush's Guantanamo policy, perhaps with the aim of bringing it into compliance with U.S. and international law. Several weeks ago, a Senate committee examined Bush's penchant for "signing statements," which he has frequently used to undercut the bills he has been signing into law. Also several weeks ago, the Senate took steps to boost their oversight of the money being spent in Iraq.

Is the GOP on Capitol Hill indeed rousing itself from a supine position, perhaps in a bid to act tough just in time for the '06 elections? I plan to probe that issue at length in a weekend newspaper column, but today, after checking out this report, I need to sound a harsh note of skepticism. Notwithstanding the fact that Congress has a constitutional responsibility to oversee the executive branch, and ask the tough questions, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas still prefers to carry the administration's water.

This week, Roberts, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has again postponed the deadline for the panel's long-awaited official examination of whether the Bush administration misused intelligence in the runup to the war in Iraq. The report by Congressional Quarterly indicates that, with the new deadlines, there is "virtually no chance" that the report will be finished, much less released, before the November congressional elections.

How convenient. But to get the full flavor of doormat behavior, let us look at the factual record of this stalled probe:

1. Roberts announced way back in February 2004 that he would permit a study of whether the Bush administration misused the prewar intelligence. This was to be "Phase II" of the committee's work. But first came "Phase I," a more limited report, which looked only at whether the intelligence agencies had screwed up. That was promptly completed on July 9, 2004.
Roberts then went on Meet the Press, and absolved Bush before the Phase II probe was even begun. He told Tim Russert that it was wrong to put the blame on Bush for his inaccurate prewar claims. Roberts contended: "What he said is what he got, and what got was wrong."

2. Reacting to suggestions that the intelligence agencies were being scapegoated, Roberts insisted on July 9 that Phase II would indeed be conducted, to assess whether Bush had twisted some of the intell. That day, Roberts told UPI: "It is a priority. I made my commitment and it will get done." Yet, two days later, he told Russert that even though Phase II was "ongoing," he had a calendar problem: "I don't know if we can get it done before the election. It is more important to get it right." The election that November was Bush versus Kerry. The report didn't get done.

3. In March 2005, Roberts told the press that Phase II was "basically on the back burner." Why? Because, in his words, it "got to be a problem, in regard to a subjective point of view."
And because, referring to the '04 elections, "we were in an even-numbered year, and you know what that means."

4. But the odd-numbered year, it turned out, wasn't going to be any better. That March, he also said that "to go through that (Phase II) exercise, it seems to me, in a post-election environment, we didn't see how we could do that and achieve any possible progress."

5. On Nov. 1, 2005, speaking on the Senate floor, he said: "What is Phase II? Why has it been delayed, if in fact it has been delayed?...It isn't like it's been delayed. As a matter of fact, it's ongoing."

6. On Feb. 12 of this year, Roberts was back on Meet the Press and told Russert: "Phase IIwill be completed, and rest assure there's nobody in Washington that wants that completed more than I do." He then volunteered that the Bush adminstration didn't personally pressure intelligence agents to hype prewar evidence -- an irrelevent point, because Phase II is supposed to be about whether the administration twisted and manipulated the evidence it received.

7. On April 25 of this year, The Hill, a reliable newspaper that covers Congress, reported that Roberts had decided to reorganize the Phase II probe, in a way that would "push off its most politically controversial elements to a later time...Left unfinished would be a report on whether public statements and testimony about Iraq by senior U.S. government officials were substantiated by available intelligence information."

Barring an unlikely Democratic takeover of the Senate in November, we can assume that Roberts' conception of congressional oversight is ongoing.

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On another matter: As I noted here yesterday, one of President Bush's lawyers testified on Capitol Hill this week that his boss had a few traits in common with Louis XIV of France and all those English royals who once believed in the divine right of kings. The quote under oath, from deputy attorney general Steven Bradbury, was: "The president is always right."

Now Bradbury says that he was only kidding. Appearing again yesterday on Capitol Hill, Bradbury said, "I guess that just shows I shouldn’t try to be humorous when I’m testifying."

I saw that original Bradbury quote on C-Span. He looked pretty grim for a side-splitting comic. Then again, it worked for Buster Keaton.

Awaiting the new White House definition of "involved"

If White House promises are intended to be taken at face value -- and if, indeed, sentences spoken in plain English are intended to be taken literally -- then empirical evidence suggests that master strategist Karl Rove should no longer be employed by the Bush administration.

In a piece published today, conservative columnist Robert Novak finally cleared up some of the mysteries surrounding his central role in the outing of undercover CIA employe Valerie Plame. He specifically named Rove as one of the sources who confirmed Plame's employment. Her employment status was supposed to remain classified; last autumn, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald specifically said so.

Novak, for those of you not tracking all the twists and turns, wrote a column on July 14, 2003 that sought to undercut retired ambassador Joe Wilson, who had publicly (and accurately) questioned the veracity of a key Bush claim about WMD activity in Iraq. As we now know, from the Fitzgerald probe, the Bush team retaliated by firing a shot across Wilson's bow, suggesting that Wilson had been sent abroad by the CIA to investigate the Bush claim only because his CIA-employed wife -- Valerie Plame -- had arranged a junket. That's the context for Plame being outed.

Anyway, by naming Rove as one of the outers, Novak is confirming that the president's closest political guru played a key role in a national security leak -- a revelation mentioned last autumn in the indictment of top Cheney aide Scooter Libby, and acknowledged by Rove's own lawyer. Moreover, Rove leaked Plame information to Newsweek reporter Matt Cooper, who kept the crucial email and ultimately gave it to Fitzgerald.

We are tempted to ask why President Bush inveighs against The New York Times for publishing leaks, but said nothing today about Robert Novak publishing leaks. Perhaps the double standard can be attributed to the fact that Novak and Rove have worked together behind the scenes, going back at least 15 years. Or the fact that the Plame leak might have deemed a "good" leak, since it was designed to aid the administration in its defense of the case for war.

But back to Rove, and my remarks at the outset about promises and plain English. After the Plame flap erupted, Bush press secretary Scott McClellan promised this, on Sept. 29, 2003: "If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration." A month later, on Oct. 30, Bush himself said this: "If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it. And we'll take the appropriate action."

Well, Novak is now the latest source to say that, yes, Rove was "involved." Yet he remains in the administration, and Bush has declined to say anything publicly about the matter. An argument can be made that Bush is clearly in the wrong on this one -- but loyalists in the administration would dispute that, because they apparently believe that Bush is never wrong.

I am not exaggerating.

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, Steven Bradbury, a top Bush lawyer, was quizzed about the Supreme Court ruling that slapped down Bush's unilateral decision to limit the rights of Guantanamo detainees. Bush has insisted in recent days that the court upheld his basic policy, so naturally Bradbury was asked how Bush could be so in the wrong about what the court actually said.

Bradbury's response: "The president is always right."

They were against Geneva before they were for it

The Bush administration today engineered a flipflop in the war on terror, thereby demonstrating that a president who would prefer to act unfettered nevertheless must bow at times to political and constitutional constraints.

Until today, the Bush team was adamantly against the idea of giving basic legal rights to detainees in U.S. custody and protecting them from inhumane treatment, as required by the Geneva Conventions. But now the Bush team says it is for Geneva. The news broke today that a Pentagon memo, citing the relevent provisions of the 1949 international accords, was circulated last Friday.

What's most instructive is the timing: The administration has taken this step just two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that Bush's unilateral and secret military tribunal process violated U.S. and international law. And this sudden bow to the Geneva accords comes on the eve of three congressional committee hearings aimed at urging the administration to accept Geneva; most tellingly, these hearings will host a phalanx of retired military lawyers who see the administration's past behavior as lawless (as retired rear admiral and Navy attorney John Hutson told the New York Times this morning, "We can finally get on the right side of the law and have a system that will pass Supreme Court and international scrutiny").

On the issue of timing, there's much more. This administration flipflop -- it was against Geneva before it was for it -- comes on the eve of Bush's upcoming trip to a G8 summit, where many of his allies have long been critical of the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo.

And lastly, reports indicate that the Pentagon memo was ordered by general counsel William Haynes, who has long been tapped by Bush to be a federal judge, but whose nomination has stalled because of ongoing questions about his key role in developing controversial interrogation methods. (A letter from 20 retired military officers charges that Haynes played a role in adopting policies "that compromised military values, ignored federal and international law, and damaged America's reputation and world leadership.") Haynes' decree about Geneva conveniently arrives on the eve of his latest confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill.

In other words, this move by the administration is a frank acknowledgement that it can no longer afford to act as it sees fit in the war on terror. Political, legal, constitutional, and international realities have intruded. This decision can also be read as a victory of sorts for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her people, who, thinking pragmatically, have been viewing the Bush policy in Guantanamo as a propaganda boon for the anti-American forces worldwide. And that means the memo is a setback for the Dick Cheney faction (helmed by indispensible Cheney aide David Addington), which didn't want Congress or the international lawyers or the military JAG lawyers to have any role in detainee policy.

Meanwhile, politicians on both sides of the aisle are probably relieved to hear about the memo. Republicans in recent days have been split about whether to basically rewrite the U.S. Code of Military Justice and thereby legalize Bush's secret tribunals; or whether they should write legislation that would curb their president and thus carry out what the high court decreed. Democrats, meanwhile, catch a break on this one. Now they won't have to worry that a Democratic message of "obey Geneva" would be demonized by the GOP -- in the runup to the '06 elections -- as national security weakness.

Nevertheless, a note of caution is in order. The Department of Defense memo says that the Geneva accords will cover all detainees in U.S. military custody (“You will ensure that all DOD personnel adhere to these standards”) -- but it doesn't address the issue of detainees who may be outside military custody, but under intelligence agency control in those less-than-secret "black sites," the Eastern European prisons.

Nor does the memo guarantee that military interrogators would find ways to circumvent the Geneva rules, or interpret them in the broadest possible manner; as Steven Bradbury, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, contended in a Senate hearing today, one key Geneva provision -- that detainees should be treated in a manner "recognized as indispensable by civilized people” -- could be read as ambiguous.

If the Bush team goes looking for loopholes, then its flipflop on Geneva may turn out to be nothing more than a rhetorical concession. Otherwise known as damage control.

Sticking with The Decider, for better or worse

As the usual sectarian violence continues to rage in Iraq -- nothing has changed since evil-doer Zarqawi was slain to great acclaim; at least 70 civilians have died around Baghdad since the weekend; an ambitious U.S. military effort to secure the city has faltered -- I am busy thumbing the pages of National Review, a conservative bible that often offers political tips to restive Republican politicians.

Here's the magazine's latest advice on how to handle the Iraq issue (which it calls "the elephant in the room") during the autumn congressional campaign: Stick with Bush, because there's no other choice.

The magazine says that GOP pols can make Iraq a winning issue if they aim their persuasive powers on those Americans who once supported the war but now deem it to be a mistake. Republican strategists believe that roughly 25 percent of the people in the mistake camp are "former hawks" who, in the magazine's view, might still be open to the old arguments that "Saddam was a threat to us and our interests," that UN containment policy was teetering, that the cost of failure would be serious; and that "Saddam had a WMD capacity and ties with terrorists." (You've got to love that last one, a deft attempt at revisionist history. Before the war, we were not told that Saddam had a "capacity" for WMDs. We were told that he actually had WMDs, and that they were aimed at us.)

Anyway, the main advice is that the only viable political choice is to stick with Bush, because "congressmen will get some credit vfrom Republican voters for being seen as resolute and standing by the president. The alternative isn't an option. There is no running from the war at this point. That will only further depress Republican hawks and implicitly make the Democratic case that the war was a mistake...The election prospects of House Republicans will be boosted if the poll numbers for the war and for Bush tick upward."

Left unsaid, however, is what could happen to some of the vulnerable Republicans if poll numbers on the war continue to slide. It's doubtful that this conservative advice would be much comfort to the moderate Republican congressmen who are fighting to save their careers in northeastern U.S. districts where antiwar sentiment is strong. Which explains why one of those endangered lawmakers, Connecticut's Christopher Shays has been voicing all kinds of mea culpas, declaring that he failed during the prewar phase to ask the tough questions. He said the other day that, by failing to get tough with the administration early on, he and other Republicans on Capitol Hill were "unfaithful to the process and our system of government."

That kind of talk presumably won't sit well with the National Review devotees who think that all Republicans should tie their fates to the Decider, but, for vulnerable Republicans, some deft distancing might up the odds on political survival.

Tom DeLay's long goodbye

Tom DeLay is starting to remind me of a John Belushi character, The Thing That Wouldn't Leave.

The Thing (on Saturday Night Live) showed up at a friend's apartment, wreaked havoc, and hung out in perpetuity, oblivious to his host's pleas that he shove off. The big difference, in DeLay's case, is that even though his hosts in the Texas Republican party dearly want him to shove off, he might nevertheless be compelled by the courts to stay and hang out, potentially wreaking havoc all the way to November.

Several months ago, it appeared that the GOP had solved its Thing problem. Freshly indicted for alleged campaign-finance violations, the avatar of the House Republican conservatives had announced he would quit his suburban Texas seat and take his name off the re-election ballot in November, thereby insuring that a corruption-free Republican could vie for that seat in a year when the outcome of every House race could be crucial. DeLay established resident in Alexandria, Virginia, hoping to demonstrate that he was no longer a Texas citizen.

But late last week, the scheme was derailed by a federal judge, who decreed that DeLay can't be disqualified from the ballot on residency grounds -- because in fact DeLay still owns a home in bucolic Sugarland. (A nice house, too. I drove past it last year. An American flagpole in the front yeard, a golf course bordering the backyard.) Result: DeLay is still on the ballot, still the candidate who would have to face the well-financed and well-known Democrat, Nick Lampson. And Lampson's best hope is that DeLay stays there. (Election-law experts generally predict that the judge's ruling will be upheld on appeal.)

That brings us to the quote of the day, courtesy of Capitol Hill's Roll Call tabloid newspaper. This comes from James Bopp, the lawyer for the Texas GOP, who is mightily ticked off that DeLay is still in the picture: "This is election by litigation. You just wonder why we even have elections at all. It's just an effort to steal a seat. (Democrats) don't care about voter choice or democracy, they just care about power."

Let's unpack that one: (1) DeLay, from Washington, engineers a plan to elect GOP majorities in both chambers of the Texas legislature, so that said legislature can redraw the boundaries of congressional districts in a way that makes it easier to elect more Republican congressmen and kick out incumbent Democrats (2) DeLay's plan unfolds in mid-decade, thereby breaching the tradition that such boundary-redrawings take place once every ten years, at the start of each new decade (3) DeLay raises allegedly illegal corporate money, to help fund the races of his Texas legislature candidates, and winds up under criminal indictment....and it's the Democrats who "just care about power"?

Strangely, Bopp never assailed the presiding federal judge as a "liberal judicial activist." Maybe that's because the judge who has kept DeLay on the ballot is, in fact, a Republican appointee, tapped for the job in 1991 by the president's father.

A spritz of Joe with a Cheney chaser

Enough about the embattled Joe Lieberman (for now). But since my newspaper column on Lieberman and the Democratic party dilemma ran this morning, I wanted to share a few of the observations that landed on the cutting room floor:

1. Leaving aside the issue of whether Senator Lieberman is betraying his Democratic party by weighing an independent candidacy in November, he has smartly looked at the electoral math in Connecticut. If he loses the nomination in the Aug. 8 primary to antiwar challenger Ned Lamont, he appears well positioned to win a three-way autumn race (the GOP nominee is weak). A check of the state voter list bears this out. The largest chunk of Connecticut voters -- 867,76 -- are "unaffiliated" (i.e. independents), and they outnumber Democratic registrants by more than 200,000. This means that Lieberman can keep his seat by combining independents and conservative Democrats. Lamont would need to demonstrate that his staunch antiwar stance and his image as darling of the left-leaning blogosphere can attract independent voters. I am skeptical. Then again, it's only July.

2. His hawkish stance on Iraq aside, Lieberman is in big trouble with his state's liberal Democratic base because he describes himself as a conciliator who can reach across the aisle and work with Republicans. But that's precisely why his base voters think he's a chump -- because, as they see it, the highly partisan Bush administration has long demonstrated that it would rather demonize and exploit Democrats than work with them. Lieberman himself was the guy who first suggested the creation of a Department of Homeland Security; the Bush team resisted it for months, then finally swiped the idea, and painted any Democrat who opposed it (or, more specifically, opposed Bush's plan to curb civil service protections for workers) as soft on national security. And, in his debate with Lamont last Thursday, Lieberman inadvertently mentioned that his work-with-Republicans credo has been a bust; at one point, talking about a recent Senate immigration bill, he called it "one of the few bipartisan accomplishments we've had in the Senate in the Bush years."

3. If Lieberman loses the primary to Lamont, he would become the first failed Democratic vice-presidential nominee to lose his party's nomination in a subsequent race. Over the past 78 years, a lot of Democratic senators have been re-elected with ease after running unsuccessfully for veep: Joe Robinson (1928), John Sparkman (1952), Estes Kefauver (1956), Ed Muskie (1968)....

On the other hand, big deal. Lieberman's potential milestone sounds a bit like one of those obscure baseball records, something akin to Most Times Striking Out in a Home Game After Nearly Homering in the Previous Game.

4. This item is a bonus: While reviewing the transcript of Lieberman's 2000 debate with Dick Cheney, I ran across an interesting passage in Cheney's remarks. To frame it properly, let us first remember how the troops in Iraq have been sent into battle without adequate body armor, and without adequate protection for the vehicles that run the gauntlet of roadside explosives. Let us also remember how a National Guardsman who complained about this, who told Donald Rumsfeld that soldiers were being forced to "dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal," was applauded by his comrades. OK, now read this Cheney remark:

It's the commander in chief who "decides when to send our young men and women to war. When we send them without the right kind of training, when we send them poorly equipped or with equipment that's old and broken down, we put their lives at risk."

Joe Lieberman tries to Kerrify his opponent

Joe Lieberman may bill himself as a staunch Democrat, but as he fights this summer to salvage his political career, he is borrowing some rhetorical tactics from Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Last night, the three-term, hawkish Connecticut senator clashed in a televised debate with the no-term, dovish Ned Lamont, the cable mogul and political neophyte who is threatening to derail Lieberman in a Democratic primary slated for Aug. 8. This the hottest political story of the season -- a former vice presidential candidate may get drummed out of his own party by the antiwar liberal base -- and the fact that Lieberman even agreed to a debate was an admission of his serious political vulnerability.

Another sign of weakness was his decision to cast aside his avuncular manner and adopt the persona of an attack dog prowling for raw meat. Lamont was the intended meat. Lieberman has apparently decided that he can ill afford the high road; instead, his only choice at this point is to build himself back up by trying to tear down his opponent.

Lieberman's goal was to erase the perception -- actually, it's the reality -- that this Connecticut primary is a party referendum on him. He wants to make the primary a referendum on Lamont, the novice challenger who, by definition, is far less experienced. In reality, Lieberman's career is imperiled because many Connecticut Democrats see him as a pro-war toady for President Bush, somebody who has aided and abetted a strategic and military disaster in Iraq, somebody who has repeatedly failed to ask the tough questions and hold Bush accountable. So Lieberman's intent is to make Lamont the bad guy, to paint Lamont as an "inconsistent, unpredictable" character who "offers mostly criticism, negativism, and pessimism."

Those were Lieberman's words last night. The thing is, they sounded a lot like the way Bush sought to depict John Kerry in 2004.

Lieberman even claimed that Lamont has had six different positions on what to do about Iraq, which, again, conjured memories of Bush's attack on Kerry as a waffler who lacks the courage of his convictions. In truth, Lamont did have a wobbly moment a few weeks ago when he and his people weren't in total sync about what should be done, at a time when Senate Democrats were offering two resolutions aimed at starting troop withdrawals. But Lamont has generally hewed to a "troops out" stance, which he repeated during the debate; he also repeated a jab at Lieberman that he has consistently employed during the primary campaign: "We have 135,000 of our bravest troops stuck in the middle of a bloody civil war. And I say that those who got us into this mess should be held accountable....The war is a mistake, and we should admit it."

At times, Lieberman tried out an old Reagan debate line ("There you go again"), whenever Lamont sought to paint Lieberman as being disloyal to the Democratic party. But it was another sign of weakness that Lieberman felt compelled to tell viewers about how often he has disagreed with Bush ("on everything from tax cuts for the rich, to privatizing Social Security"). And it's true, as Lieberman said, that he has voted with his Democratic colleagues roughly 90 percent of the time.

But voting records can be misleading. Three random examples: Lieberman was one of the last Senate Democrats to join the fight opposing the Bush plan to partially privatize Social Security. Second, while Lieberman did vote against Bush high court nominee Sam Alito, his initial act was to oppose any prospect for a Democratic filibuster that might have blocked Alito at the outset. Third, he helped Lynne Cheney (wife of Dick) create an academic organization that has assailed university professors who criticized Bush's foreign policy. (Lamont, however, didn't make these points. He looked at times like a deer caught in the headlights, predictable behavior for a guy making his debut as debater on national television.)

I have no idea whether Lieberman has helped or hurt himself with Connecticut Democrats who plan to vote in the primary. Will they be turned off by Lieberman's aggressive behavior, and the fact that he treated Lamont as excrement attached to the underside of the senatorial shoe? Or will they give him points for political courage, for sticking to his guns on Iraq despite the fact that the most motivated primary voters are probably the folks who hate the war?

I tend to doubt that the answer to the latter question will be "Yes." I suspect that most primary voters will resent the fact that Lieberman (like Bush) basically implied that those who oppose this war are endangering national security. As Lieberman said to Lamont at one point, "If you want to turn Iraq over to the terrorists, follow the policy you have enunicated."

That was two-fisted stuff. And as the hour end, one final thought struck me:

Why wasn't Lieberman this tough when he faced off in the 2000 vice presidential debate against Dick Cheney? Why was he far more schmoozy with Bush's taciturn sidekick? (As Connecticut radio host Colin McEnroe recalled this morning, "he let Dick Cheney walk into the debate as Darth Vader and out as Mister Rogers.")

Lieberman had better hope that, on Aug. 8, Connecticut Democrats don't ask themselves the same thing.
And I'll have more to say about this primary -- and the national Democrats' predicament -- in a newspaper column slated to run Sunday or Monday.

Zarqawi, Lay, and God

The news marches on, even at holiday time, which is why I just spied a certain pithy quote about the latest bloodshed in Iraq. It appears that the ballyhooed U.S. slaying of terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi hasn't amounted to a hill o' beans in this crazy world. The quote:

"In terms of the level of violence, it (his slaying) has not had any impact at this point. As you know, the level of violence is still quite high."

Who would say such a thing -- perhaps the "America-hating" New York Times? A "defeatist" liberal somewhere? A "cut and run" Democrat, such as John Murtha?

No. That quote belongs to Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's ambassador to Iraq. And he said it on Independence Day, no less. Granted, he was only acknowledging factual reality -- the civilian death tally in Baghdad has actually increased sharply since Zarqawi's death -- but surely there must be a constitutional amendment that forbids the uttering of truths inconvenient to the Bush administration.

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I was on a plane yesterday when this gem surfaced:

In the wake of the death of convicted Enron felon Ken Lay, Bush press secretary Tony Snow was asked to comment on the relationship between Lay and his boss. Snow replied, "The president has described Ken Lay as an acquaintance."

"Kenny boy" was just an acquaintance? Not according to letters released under the Freedom of Information Act. Here's the governor of Texas, writing to the corporate leader back in 1997: "Dear Ken: One of the sad things about old friends is that they seem to be getting older -- just like you! 55 years old. Wow! That is really old. Thank goodness you have such a young, beautiful wife. Laura and I value our friendship with you. Best wishes to Linda, your family, and friends.
Your younger friend, George W. Bush."

Chatty exchanges about jogging, gifts, bad knees...It appears that the definition of "acquaintance" is a friend who defrauded his employes.

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But, of course, many liberals have their own problems with factual reality. Witness some of the reaction lately to Senator Barack Obama's provocative speech about the role of religion in politics, and the failure of his fellow Democrats to attract devout voters.

Obama, the much-touted presidential candidate of 2012 or 2016 or 2020, probably alienated some folks on the left by stating the obvious last week:

"(T)here are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word 'Christian' describes one's political opponents, not people of faith....(I)f we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.... (S)ecularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition."

Obama has come under attack for making these arguments. The basic charge is that he is consorting with the enemy, feeding the GOP line that Democrats are Godless. David Sirota, a top liberal activist, complains: "The more high-profile Democrats give credence to right-wing lies/myths, the more the party's image problem grows. It's time for Democratic leaders who show the country what they believe in - instead of telling the public the lies we already hear on right-wing radio." And prominent liberal blogger Chris Bowers writes: "So thanks Senator Obama, for reifying this Republican-driven talking point about Democrats. Now almost everyone will think that Democrats are hostile to people of faith. Well done."

The problem with those analyses is that, as actual electoral evidence makes clear, Democrats do have a problem with people of faith. What Obama said is not new at all; various liberal religious leaders, such as Jim Wallis, for several years have been urging Democrats to close the "God gap." Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, a nonpartisan with no axe to grind, has been chronicling the Democrats' problem for a long time. It most recently manifested itself in 2005, when John Kerry won only 21 percent of white evangelical Christians -- nine percent lower than Al Gore's share in 2000.

During the fall of 2004, John Green, an Ohio academic who specializes in religion and politics, told me that the swing group in the election -- comprising 19 percent of the electorate -- would be "centrist Catholics" and "centrist evangelicals," people who go to church regularly, yet who are suspicious about the religious right. Those voters, he said, were looking for a reason to vote Democratic, looking for signals that the Democrats respected their religiosity. But in the end, they didn't vote for Kerry in the numbers that he needed.

It would appear that electoral statistics support this conclusion, from Democratic strategist Dan Gerstein (memo to liberal readers: yes, he did work for Joe Lieberman, but that doesn't automatically disqualify his view). Gerstein writes on his own blog: "The electoral math here is simply undeniable. Democrats are getting crushed in the competition for faith-based voters, and because our base is considerable smaller than the Republicans, we simply don't have the luxury to ignore (or God forbid insult) this considerable bloc any longer if we want to become a majority party again. To acknowledge that deficit and work to fix it is not giving aid and comfort to the enemy -- it's taking common sense to its logical conclusion."

One last thought: When I read Obama's remarks about clueless Democrats who send the wrong signals on religion, I remembered a comment that Howard Dean made during the '04 primary season. Dean explained during a debate that in the 1980s he had switched from the Episcopal Church to the Congregational Church because the former wouldn't give him the land to build a bike path.

No wonder Karl Rove viewed Dean as his favorite Democratic candidate.

And don't forget that sunblock

My column below, on President Bush and The New York Times, will suffice for awhile. Five leisure days lie ahead, in a locale without wi-fi; therefore, blogging will resume next Thursday. Have a great holiday, and see you all on the flipside.

Times-bashing as a political tool

The Bush administration's war against the evildoers who are out to endanger America -- I am referring, of course, to The New York Times -- is proceeding according to plan.

The conservative Republican base, which badly needed to be fired up, is now suitably galvanized against its perceived common enemy. The conservative commentariat is also playing its accustomed role, ratcheting up the president's rhetoric about five notches. And the Republicans in Congress, many of them nervous about the '06 elections, are back on the attack, challenging the Democrats to accept the GOP's narrow framing of the issue and either stand up for The Times, or stand up for national security.

Because this is really about politics.

This war on The Times was ostensibly triggered by the newspaper's decision a week ago to run its story about the secret Bush program that sifts international bank data in order to pinpoint terrorist money. The story detailed some of the relations between U.S. security officials and the banking consortium known as SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) , but the main point was that the scrutiny of people's financial records is proceeding without specific congressional approval, or formal authorization, or court warrants, or subpoenas targeting specific transactions -- or any indication whether this one-time emergency plan has in fact become permanent.

Bush assailed The Times' decision to publish as a "disgrace," and the conservative commentariat piled on, with first prize for vitriol arguably being awarded to San Francisco talk show host Melanie Morgan, who said that Times editor Bill Keller should "be sent to the gas chamber" for treason. Second prize -- and the competition is stiff -- arguably goes to blogger Scott Johnson (a Minneapolis attorney, no less) who warned that The Times might well continue to "betray the national security of the United States" unless "an enraged citizenry" decides "to take the law into its own hands," a remark that can be read as an incitement to violence.

Surely, some of The Times' critics are sincerely enraged about the SWIFT story. But it's also a fact that, for the Bush administration, The Times is a perfect political pinata. The conservative base hates The Times because it's eastern, it's "New York" (and all that implies), it runs liberal editorials, it has a lot of Ivy Leaguers. The Bush team knows this, which is why it has been slamming The Times for years. Bush specifically skewered The Times in the midst of his 2004 convention speech. Dick Cheney booted The Times off his campaign plane that year. Bush and Cheney, standing at an open mike in 2000, singled out a Times reporter by calling him "a major league (orifice)."

So, whacking The Times is good politics in an election year. What better way to galvanize a conservative base that has been disaffected by (among other things) Iraq, the Dubai ports deal, and runaway federal spending? What better way to calm the nerves of vulnerable Republican incumbents than to unite them in the cause of Times-bashing (as GOP operative Joe Gaylord told The Washington Post the other day, "the guys who are up this fall are scared as hell”) ?

This is not conjecture on my part; Bush's followers talk openly about Times-bashing as a tactic. Commentator Jack Kelly thinks it'd be great for the base if Bush prosecuted The Times for publishing the SWIFT story: "In picking a fight with journalists over leaks, President Bush would be picking on one of the few groups in America less popular than he is, on the issue where he is on the firmest ground with the public. Media uproar over prosecution of the Times would drown out other issues where the president is on shakier ground. This is a fight to be welcomed, not avoided."

The press is less popular than the president? Actually, Gallup did a poll this month, asking Americans how they currently feel about their institutions. 70 percent said they favorably viewed newspapers "a great deal," "quite a lot" or "some." Fifty-eight percent felt that way about the presidency. But never mind all that. Here's the main problem with the Times-bashing strategy: The core argument -- that the SWIFT story undercut national security by telling terrorists that we're trying to track their money -- is not nearly as airtight as the conservatives think it is. Consider...

1. The Bush administration has tipped off the terrorists, almost since day one, that we were going to track their money. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, less than a month after 9/11, said, "The Treasury Department will use every tool we have at our disposal to shut down terrorist fundraising and dismantle their organizations one dollar at a time." Bush, campaigning for re-election on April 19, 2004, said, "See, part of the way to make sure that we catch terrorists is we chase money trails."

2. Press secretary Tony Snow said the other day that "I am absolutely sure (the terrorists) didn't know about SWIFT" prior to The Times' story, but it's hard to see how he can be so certain, given the fact that (as The Washington Posts Dan Froomkin discovered) SWIFT already has its own website -- with information about how it works with law enforcement "to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities."

3. The United Nations published a report four years ago that discussed SWIFT. Former State Department official Victor Comraes, on his Counterterrorism blog, talks about how terrorism financing experts have known about SWIFT since 2002, part because of that report -- which is still available on the UN website for anyone to read. One key passage: "The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions."

4. Stuart Levey, undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, spoke at length and in public nearly two years ago about government efforts to track terrorist money through the international banking system. He did this in open testimony on Sept. 22, 2004, before the House Financial Service Committee, chaired by Michael Oxley of Ohio.

What's noteworthy, this week, is that Oxley sponsored the resolution condemning the SWIFT story for supposedly making it tougher to track terrorist money -- yet, in 2004, Oxley was told by Levey that the terrorists weren't much interested anymore in moving money through the legal financial sector, because of all the heightened scrutiny. Levey testified: "The movement of money via cash couriers is now one of the principle methods that terrorists use to move funds."

5. Some House Republicans, during a floor debate yesterday, pointed out that 9/11 Commission co-chairman Tom Kean had urged that The Times not publish the SWIFT story. That is absolutely true. But Kean's position is more nuanced than that. The other day, in an interview with liberal blogger Greg Sargent, the ex-Republican New Jersey governor stated that SWIFT "gave us a chance to disrupt terrorist plots. But I would not go as far as to say (that The Times' story) put American lives at risk." He also said that The Times didn't commit a criminal act, that it therefore should not be prosecuted, and that the Bush administration's rhetoric has been "over the top."

6. Roger Cressey, a counterterrorism official who worked in Bush's National Security Council until 2003, has been telling reporters all week that the SWIFT story didn't tell terrorists anything they didn't already know or assume. On today's Times op-ed page, he wrote, "They (Bush officials) want the public to believe that it had not already occurred to every terrorist on the planet that his telephone was probably monitored and his international bank transfers (were) subject to scrutiny. How gullible does the administration take the American citizenry to be?"

Indeed, will most Americans view this Times-bashing as a defensible response to a substantive issue -- or as a political strategy aimed at ginning up the GOP base? On the House floor yesterday, Oxley denied that it was the latter, saying, "This is serious business, this isn't politics."

Oh really? Then why did I receive an email today from the Republican National Committee -- the party's political arm, financed by political contributions -- declaring that "House Democrats Put The New York Times First, National Security Second"?

And this argument, which appeared the other day in the Washington Times, serves to rebut the Bush administration strategy: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people would soon wither if the press were deterred from publishing information that the president claimed might weaken national security. Perpetually secret government and democracy are incompatible." So spoke conservative Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan.

Not even Smallville values are safe anymore

Just in time for the summer holiday movie season, it appears that those Hollywood lefty moonbats have really done it this time. The alarmed headline today on the right-leaning Drudge Report says it all: "Even Superman is Not American Anymore?"

Turns out that the screenwriter and director of the new Superman flick have indeed revised the old slogan (popularized by the '50s TV show) about how our hero represents "truth, justice and the American way." Those last three words are missing now. As the scribe explained to The Hollywood Reporter, "The world has changed. The world is a different place. The truth is he's an alien. He was sent from another planet. He has landed on the planet Earth, and he is here for everybody. He's an international super-hero."

But fear not, say the pollsters at Fox News, who report that such assaults on tradition may be having only a limited impact. Amid suggestions lately from gay activists that the updated internationalist Superman is really one of their own (note how he closets his true identity), Fox took the time to add a crucial question to their latest survey: "Do you think the Superman character in the new movie is gay or straight?" And the people have spoken: Only six percent say he's gay. The hitch, however: 69 percent say they don't know.

So even Superman may be at risk. This is a job...for a constitutional amendment.